A worldwide map of abandoned places, assembled from open government and community datasets. 452,820 locations across 226 countries, filtered and scored rather than dumped.
Entering an abandoned building is trespassing in most countries, and many of these places are genuinely dangerous. Collapsing floors, asbestos, flooded basements, contaminated ground and unguarded drops are all normal in derelict structures.
This map tells you a place exists. It does not tell you that you may enter it, that it is safe, or that it still stands. Check who owns a site and get permission. Take photographs, take nothing else, break nothing, and leave every place exactly as you found it.
Every location here is imported from open records, and none has been confirmed on the ground. Buildings are demolished without the records catching up. Château de Noisy in Belgium is in this database as a ruin, and it was demolished in 2017. Treat every entry as a lead, not a fact.
Everything is public open data. Nothing has been scraped from other urban exploration sites: those spot lists belong to the people who built them.
| Source | Records | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| OpenStreetMap , ruins, bunkers, disused buildings | 481,427 | ODbL 1.0 |
| USGS MRDS , worked-out mines worldwide | 128,816 | Public domain |
| GeoNames , abandoned settlements and structures | 94,310 | CC BY 4.0 |
| OurAirports , closed airfields | 11,926 | Public domain |
| Historic England, Heritage at Risk register | 8,738 | Open Government Licence |
| CASIAS / BASIAS , former French industrial sites | 2,615 | Open data (BRGM) |
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence. Place names from GeoNames under CC BY 4.0. Mine records from the United States Geological Survey. Heritage at Risk data © Historic England, under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Former industrial sites from BRGM / Géorisques. Base map tiles by OpenFreeMap from OpenStreetMap data. Satellite imagery © Esri.
The imported layer is derived from OpenStreetMap and is therefore offered under the same ODbL terms. If you build on it, credit OpenStreetMap contributors and share your derived database under ODbL as well.
Raw open data contains a great deal that is technically abandoned and completely uninteresting. Records are dropped when they are:
What survives is scored on naming, category, source agreement and mapped geometry. Roughly 193,000 rejected records are kept aside rather than deleted, because some of them are real and simply badly documented.
Coverage is measured, not asserted. A benchmark of thirty world-famous abandoned places: Pripyat, Hashima, Bodie, Kolmanskop, Beelitz-Heilstätten and others, find 25 of them, a recall of 83%. The five misses are places that are partly inhabited, politically contested, or outside the regions harvested so far.
If a location here is wrong, demolished, on private land that should not be publicised, or dangerous in a way the map does not say, please report it. For errors in the underlying map data, the best fix is to correct it at OpenStreetMap, where it benefits everyone.